
Written by: Dean Lorey and Jay Huguely
Directed by: Adam Marcus
Reviewed by: Dave Dunwoody
The eighth sequel. The second time we’ve been promised Jason’s “final” outing. And he’s barely even in the damn movie. Jason Goes to Hell, which performed poorly at the box office and was similarly dismissed by most Friday fans, seems to have a lot going against it, and it always did – from the very beginning, when Sean Cunningham called for a new Jason film that would ignore previous sequels and get rid of “that damn hockey mask”. Dean Lorey was brought in to operate on Jay Huguely’s Part IX script, which featured Jason’s brother Elias as the killer. In keeping with the tradition of other slasher sagas (see Halloween/Scream/NOES), Lorey retained the long-lost relative – only now it was a sister, and she was the unwilling key to Jason’s resurrection after being blown to bits by the FBI.

The gripes start here. Sure, Jason’s still murdering nubile campers (and delivers some of the series’ most gruesome kills), but it’s not really Jason, is it? It’s some kind of demon passing from body to body. Wrong – it is Jason. As bounty hunter Creighton Duke (Lorey’s greatest contribution to the script, played to eccentric perfection by Steven Williams) tells TV journalist Robert Campbell, Jason wears bodies like suits. The real Voorhees is something that neither his victims nor fans have ever seen – until now.
Never before has Jason’s will to survive been more evident. With the destruction of his body, he retreats into his malformed black heart and transforms it into a body-hopping vessel. First, he has to massage the coroner’s mind until the guy’s crazy enough to eat the damn thing. From there it’s a simple matter of passing from one gullet to another in the form of a writhing “soul maggot”.

After escaping the federal morgue and making a brief stop at the defunct Camp Crystal Lake, Jason sets his sights on the town itself, and his sister Diana. Unfortunately for him, the awkward Steven Freeman (John D. LeMay) has also come back to town, and becomes Voorhees’ reluctant nemesis after witnessing Diana’s death. See, Steven is the ex-boyfriend of Diana’s daughter, who is next on the masked one’s hit list. He’s also the father of her baby. And Jason needs the body of a blood relative in order to reclaim his original form…

Despite all that pesky character development, however, JGTH racks up an impressive bodycount. It also benefits from gags like Kane Hodder as a doomed FBI agent, Dean Lorey as a nebbish coroner’s assistant, and the appearance of The Evil Dead’s Necronomicon in the ancient Voorhees house – an in-joke that would mystify fans for years and which nearly led to the epic horror mash-up Freddy vs Jason vs Ash. Most of all, it benefits from having Marcus at the helm and Lorey mapping Jason’s swath of destruction. These two guys are dedicated Friday fans, and they were trying to do something fresh and fun with the umpteenth sequel.

It is great to see Kane come back for the last hurrah, but it’s also interesting to see how other actors portray Jason when their characters are possessed by his spirit. From the grunting, animalistic coroner to the sadistically grinning Robert Campbell, we see different aspects of Jason through the years amplified. We also witness his cruel intellect, as he possesses one last victim and talks (!) to trick Steven and Jessica.




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